Kitchen Sink by Alison Maclean
October 13, 2009 3:06 PM   Subscribe

Kitchen Sink is a creepy short film made by Alison Maclean.
posted by sciurus (29 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is one of those movies that affected my childhood dreams. I don't remember my dreams often.
posted by ZaneJ. at 3:12 PM on October 13, 2009


Ew!
posted by dammitjim at 3:13 PM on October 13, 2009


Ugh. Shave with the grain! With the grain! No wonder he's grumpy at the end, he's a great big mass of ingrown hairs.
posted by stavrogin at 3:21 PM on October 13, 2009


If anyone "favorites" this, we are getting them a psych eval.
posted by HuronBob at 3:27 PM on October 13, 2009


creepy is an understatement.
posted by debbie_ann at 3:28 PM on October 13, 2009


Kitchen Sink is a creepy short film

Yes, yes it is. What a bizarre film. I love the chicken-skin effect at the end.
posted by Pantengliopoli at 3:29 PM on October 13, 2009


I found myself continually saying "Don't DO that!"
posted by HuronBob at 3:38 PM on October 13, 2009


omg, right? I hate getting fetuses stuck in the garbage disposal.
posted by sexyrobot at 3:40 PM on October 13, 2009


That was terrific! I wasn't aware of her pre feature work before.
posted by cazoo at 3:47 PM on October 13, 2009


I watched this with an entire lecture theatre full of people a while ago. I think about 90% visibly flinched in the scene where she accidentally cuts him with the razor.
posted by fearthehat at 3:49 PM on October 13, 2009


what
posted by Nattie at 4:22 PM on October 13, 2009


I kept thinking of Eraserhead while watching this.
posted by I'm Brian and so's my wife! at 4:47 PM on October 13, 2009


Awesome. The end kind of reminded me of this. (warning: pus - lots of pus)
posted by hanoixan at 4:49 PM on October 13, 2009


I hate getting fetuses stuck in the garbage disposal.

The first thing I do when I find a fetus in the kitchen sink is toss it in the kitchen trash.

Not really. This short could have creeped me out-- it was atmospheric and shot lovingly in creepy black and white, but everything the she did was stupid and irritating. I got tired of watching her pull one bone-headed move after another.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 5:00 PM on October 13, 2009


"I got tired of watching her pull one bone-headed move after another."

There ya go... although, the logical move after putting the monster you just shaved and slept with in a trash bag is to get naked and take a bath........with the door open.....
posted by HuronBob at 5:03 PM on October 13, 2009


New Zealand sure has some weird anti-abortion PSAs.
posted by saladin at 5:24 PM on October 13, 2009


Clearly I'm crazy, because I thought that short film was 100 kinds of awesome. I love that atmospheric creepy stuff -- and I am particularly drawn to stories where the central character behaves in the exact opposite way that you would in that situation. It makes you reflect on why, and you stretch your brain to all of the different things that might have caused her to behave that way -- good stuff. Definitely reminds me a lot of David Lynch.

Weirdly enough, it reminds me a bit of the video game Silent Hill 2 (in which the central character does all of this really bizarre stuff, completely without regard for his own safety, which makes the story so much more interesting). I believe saying this on the internet qualifies me as a GIANT nerd.
posted by pazazygeek at 5:58 PM on October 13, 2009


I dug it, although the way in which it is not like Eraserhead is that, in Lynch's film, the main character's decisions all make a fucked-up kind of sense -- I mean, I HAVE NO IDEA why she would put the guy she's just slept next to all night in a sealed bag to suffocate.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:27 PM on October 13, 2009


I HAVE NO IDEA why she would put the guy she's just slept next to all night in a sealed bag to suffocate.

Maybe she used to work at the Playboy Mansion?
posted by CynicalKnight at 7:18 PM on October 13, 2009


Go back one step. I don't know why she'd sleep with a guy she's just pulled out of the kitchen drain.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 7:18 PM on October 13, 2009


I think this film uses the man as a metaphor for a dream: how you give birth to it, try everything you can to make it real, abandon it time and again only to be drawn back to its elusive grasp; and how it can tenuously unravel at the exact moment you fall in love with it.
posted by any major dude at 7:23 PM on October 13, 2009 [1 favorite]


Go back one step. I don't know why she'd sleep with a guy she's just pulled out of the kitchen drain.

No, that made sense to me. If I pulled a weird fetus out of my sink and found that getting wet made it turn into a naked girl...whose body I then shaved...um...you know what? Okay, yeah, you're right, I don't know why she did that, either.

I think this film uses the man as a metaphor for a dream: how you give birth to it, try everything you can to make it real, abandon it time and again only to be drawn back to its elusive grasp; and how it can tenuously unravel at the exact moment you fall in love with it.

Yeah, it kinda seemed like a Pygmalion/Galatea deal to me (it also reminded me vaguely of Theodore Sturgeon's "Bright Segment," a short story considerably more realistic than the film, but with similar themes).
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:26 PM on October 13, 2009


Up to minute two this is pretty much me and the bathtub drain every couple of months... The fact that I'm not bald is an utter mystery to me.
posted by nanojath at 7:44 PM on October 13, 2009


This was great! The sound design was sickeningly awesome; clearly a lot of care and attention went into all the small details. Particularly impressive for the fact that it was 1989 and must have been cut on (a lot of) tape.

For those who didn't put the pieces together, Alison Maclean since directed Jesus' Son and a bunch of other stuff including Sex and The City episodes and apparently an episode of Pete and Pete.
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 8:02 PM on October 13, 2009


That's... kind of great, and I don't know why.
(Favorited for the free psych eval. Thanks, HuronBob!)
posted by Limiter at 8:10 PM on October 13, 2009


Homeboy looks like Pete Townsend
posted by captainsohler at 9:39 PM on October 13, 2009


I think this film uses the man as a metaphor for a dream: how you give birth to it, try everything you can to make it real, abandon it time and again only to be drawn back to its elusive grasp; and how it can tenuously unravel at the exact moment you fall in love with it.

I read it as a bit less metaphorical than that, even; here's a woman who seems to be living alone and to be drudging along, but there's a photo at 5:38 or so that shows her laughing and hanging around with a couple of men. It's the tiniest slice of background, but it implies some history and some sense of a Before that was different from where she is now.

Is her motivation as wishywashy as just chasing after a dream in creepy abstract, or is there some more literal collection of gut motivations driving her to make these (bizarre and self-contradictory) decisions: maternal instincts (child lost? child never gotten?) making her try somehow to care for the fetus after first rejecting it; romantic/parternship instincts overcoming her later revulsion and leading her to try to care for and even share a bed with it (partner lost, one of the men in the photos or even the photographer?); then, after a night spent sleeplessly laying next to this weird simulacrum, a return of revulsion and loathing as she realizes that bringing order and companionship back into her life can't be this simple and strange, so she bags him up with the intent of somehow throwing him out.

But then things turn around or seem to, and we get the last short act.

The motivations for the character aren't rational, but they're not random, either—it's not Horror Film Stupid, it's horror fugue, someone who hasn't managed to hold their own rationality about them and so is making decisions on a level that makes sense to them moment-to-moment even though the wisdom of the whole arc of decisions is lacking. The crushing weight of real loss and despair clouding her judgment of something that, for all its horrifying aspects, also seems somehow at times to be to good to be true, and that when she is in the hopeful swing of the pendulum she's willing to pretend is good.
posted by cortex at 6:56 AM on October 14, 2009 [1 favorite]


The motivations for the character aren't rational, but they're not random, either—it's not Horror Film Stupid, it's horror fugue...

Bang on (and oh so prettily put), cortex.

No, that made sense to me. If I pulled a weird fetus out of my sink and found that getting wet made it turn into a naked girl...whose body I then shaved...um...you know what? Okay, yeah, you're right, I don't know why she did that, either.


So bad & brilliant, kittens for breakfast!

I'd love to send this on to my freshly film school graduated son. It's a masterclass in the art of the short film (for all the superb reasons given here).

But it might be taken as a criticism. All through college, his lecturers have begged all the students not to get too ambitious with their final year films - but to work on the story and around the limitations of the budget.

And of course the first drafts of these projects begin : 'it's some time in the future and from his helicopter, the hero watches crowds of mutants crawling up the beach..."
posted by Jody Tresidder at 7:29 AM on October 14, 2009


I often do this when I'm in need of a shave. I usually jump up and say "thanks! gotta go!" before things get too weird though.
posted by orme at 9:50 AM on October 14, 2009


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